Children feel like they get more out of their relationships with their pets than they do with their brothers and sisters, a new study suggests.

This research only factored in 77 children in the UK, so we can’t read too much into it just yet, but it adds to the growing body of evidence for the crucial role that pets play in our well-being and happiness.

First off, no one is suggesting that pets can replace the valuable role that siblings play in people’s lives. Instead, the researchers were looking to find out more about how having pets in the family can influence kids’ well-being and development as they grow up.

 “Anyone who has loved a childhood pet knows that we turn to them for companionship and disclosure, just like relationships between people,” said lead researcher Matt Cassells from the University of Cambridge in the UK. “We wanted to know how strong these relationships are with pets relative to other close family ties.”

To figure this out, the team surveyed 77 12-year-olds from different families in the UK. The participants included a mix of girls and boys, but all the kids had at least one pet at home, and one or more siblings.

To get an understanding of how well the children related to their pets, the researchers adopted something called the Network of Relationships Inventory — a well-established psychological tool that measures the quality of people’s relationships.

They found that children reported having stronger relationships with their pets than their siblings, as well as lower levels of conflict — these results were particularly seen in kids with dogs.

This test is by no means objective — as children, we often fight with our siblings, and at times feel like they barely understand us. So asking a 12-year-old how much satisfaction they get from their sibling relationships is filled with complications.

But at this early stage in the research, the team wasn’t looking for a definitive answer on the importance of relationships — instead they wanted to know how valuable kids felt their pets were to them. And the results suggest they play a big role in their lives.

The team also showed that girls reported having closer relationships with their pets than boys did — although both sexes were equally satisfied with their animals.

“While previous research has often found that boys report stronger relationships with their pets than girls do, we actually found the opposite,” said Cassells.

“While boys and girls were equally satisfied with their pets, girls reported more disclosure, companionship, and conflict with their pet than boys did, perhaps indicating that girls may interact with their pets in more different ways.”

There’s a lot more research that needs to be done into this space to figure out just how beneficial pets really are to families, but it’s not the only study looking into this question.